Electoral Turnover Research Articles

Gender Turnover and Roll‐Call Voting in the U.S. House of Representatives

A number of studies suggest that the gender of a legislator affects his or her congressional ideology. We argue that these studies may have produced misleading results because of insufficient controls for constituency influences. To better account for constituency effects, we use a longitudinal research design based on electoral turnover, which holds constituency constant while allowing gender and party to vary. We apply ordinary least squares regression to data from the 103d, 104th, and 105th Houses of Representatives and estimate the effect of gender turnover on changes in DW‐NOMINATE roll‐call voting scores. We find that, when we sufficiently control for both party and constituency influences, gender is not a determinant of the liberalness of a representative's roll‐call voting behavior.

Political Transaction Costs and the Politics of Administrative Design

We propose a political transaction cost theory of the politics of administrative design and then evaluate the theory using data on the initial design attributes of 141 federal administrative agencies created legislatively between 1879 and 1988. The theory posits that the enacting coalition attempts to strategically manipulate administrative design attributes and therefore political transaction costs for future coalitions seeking to affect agency policy. Based on perceptions of the probability of political holdup and resulting losses, the enacting coalition alters political transaction costs to optimize expected benefits. We gauge the perceived probability of political holdup using measures of executive-legislative conflict, coalitional conflict, electoral turnover, and party hegemony. Using structural probit analysis, the results show that these factors significantly affect agency design attributes involving structure, process, and monitoring. Thus, the statistical analysis is consistent with the theory that the enacting coalition manipulates political transaction costs in designing U.S. administrative agencies.

Mayors and Mayoral Careers

Utilizing data from a survey of cities with populations of 100,000 or more, we examine the background characteristics and political careers of large-city mayors. The background characteristics of this elite group are substantially different from the mass public's but are similar to elected officials' at other levels of government. At the mayoral level electoral turnover is frequent, and partisan change is not uncommon. However, most of the turnover results from voluntary retirement rather than from electoral defeat. Thus the argument that nonrepresentativeness resulting from background and attitudinal differences between the elite and mass public is mitigated through electorally induced responsiveness is suspect.

The Unemployment Rate Consequences of Partisan Monetary Policies

Economists and political scientists have identified several ways in which political motivations and institutional arrangements can affect macroeconomic policymaking. One way is described by the political business cycle model [42; 37], in which vote-seeking politicians manipulate the path of the economy to secure unsustainably favorable conditions at election times. Variants of this model have been widely tested, with limited success.' A second channel for political impacts comes through partisan policy changes brought about by electoral turnover. The pathbreaking work in this literature includes the contributions of Hibbs [30; 31; 32; 33] and Beck [11]. These works have focused on the empirical issue of how unemployment rates vary under Democratic and Republican presidents in the U.S., and have found strong support for the proposition that unemployment rates decline under Democratic administrations. A third phenomenon has been studied primarily by economists, and concerns the credibility problem faced by a central bank selecting money growth rates. Models of the credibility problem [8; 21] describe a setting in which the central bank and the public interact by respectively choosing actual and expected money growth rates. In a variant of the prisoners' dilemma, this interaction can result in excessive inflation.

Incumbency and Electoral Turnover in Latin America

In contemporary Latin America whenever there are successive free elections turnover tends to occur at every opportunity. That is, incumbent parties or coalitions seldom win; if they do, they almost invariably show diminished electoral support compared to that of the previous election.The frequency of incumbent defeat seems especially remarkable in view of the traditionally strong Latin American presidency. The history of some Latin American countries has been replete withcontinuismo(the perpetuation of a president or regime in office through manipulation of formal constitutional procedures). Even in those polities with a record of frequent adherence to constitutional norms, the president has tended to be “strong,” at least compared to other governmental institutions, such as legislatures, courts, and state or local governments. Unsatisfied with the term “presidential,” in the North American sense, Jacques Lambert calls Latin American governments “regimes of presidential dominance” (Lambert, 1967).

Incumbency, Electoral Safety, and Turnover in the House of Representatives, 1952–76

Two hypotheses have received a great deal of attention from students of congressional elections. First, many analysts have concluded that an increase in the electoral value attached to incumbency accounts for the rise in incumbents' victory margins observed since the mid-sixties. Second, many scholars have attributed the decline in electoral turnover to the percentage increase in victory margins. Analyzing the electoral histories of 13 House cohorts (1952-76), this study reexamines these two hypotheses within the framework of a quasi-experimental design. The results presented here, in contrast to those of previous studies, cast doubt on the increased incumbency effect. Moreover, little relationship is found between an increase in electoral safety, as reflected by increased victory margins, and a decline in electoral turnover.

The Overlapping Worlds of American Federal Executives and Congressmen

Along with other American public institutions, Congress and the federal bureaucracy have fallen upon hard times. Each has been the target of much public scorn. Among academic theorists who have compared the contemporary roles of the bureaucracy and Congress, however, Congress has received the worst evaluation by far. It has often been treated as a more or less quaintly archaic institution, structurally unable to cope with the complexities of national issues. Samuel Huntington delineates several factors which he thinks tend to insulate Congress from an effective national policy-making role. Internally, the institutionalization of Congress has created a system of leadership selection which fragments authority and rewards and reinforces provincial perspectives. Externally, with rare exceptions, electoral turn-over is limited. Thus, the intake of new blood, especially in the House, is mostly dependent upon voluntary departures or biological processes. Equally important in Huntington's view are the characteristics of the congressmen themselves. They are, as many have pointed out, essentially local politicians oriented to local rather than national problems. Their incentives lie in looking ‘homeward’ to local constituencies rather than outward to the nation. Edward Shils has described their orientations as ‘those of the small town society’, suspicious of large organization and wary of complexity. Responsiveness to local interests, not comprehension of complex national policy problems, is the sine qua non of the congressman's political survival.